KarPur

What is KarPur?

KarPur is a fan project. It takes the ARM64 code of Pokémon Scarlet & Violet (Nintendo Switch, 2022) and translates it into C code, which it compiles into a Windows program. The Switch system and its graphics API are replaced by a runtime of our own, and the game draws its pictures through Vulkan.

In practice that means:

• a steady 60 FPS
• DLSS, DLAA and Frame Generation
• keyboard and mouse
• more wild Pokémon

The KarPur Launcher does all the building for you.

Requirements

Your game

You also need prod.keys from the same console.

Your PC

Platforms

Status

Milestone M6 of 6: PC extras. The game is playable: from the title screen into the open world, with battles, picnics, fast travel, saving and loading. Now the work is on PC features and polish.

Details: docs/roadmap.md · daily log: docs/progress.md

Features

🎮 Smooth play

• 60 FPS, with the game's speed kept right, smooth effects and smooth walking indoors. 90, 120 and 144 FPS are available as experimental limits.
• All shaders prepared during the build: about 36,000 shaders from your own game files are translated and handed to the graphics driver ahead of time. New areas, Pokémon and attacks appear without the stutter of first-time shader builds.

✨ Picture

• NVIDIA DLAA: smooth edges in the 3D world, at about 1 ms per frame.
• NVIDIA DLSS: the 3D world is rendered at your window's size, or at 4K and then scaled down.
• DLSS Frame Generation: 2× on RTX 40, up to 4× on RTX 50 cards. It needs Windows' hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.
• NVIDIA's files are not part of KarPur: you add your own copies (from any game that ships DLSS) in the launcher.
• AMD FSR 1 or bilinear scaling, with sharpness, when DLSS is off. The console's own Handheld mode (1280×720, a real speed gain) is selectable too, next to the usual Docked (1920×1080) — a genuine performance option for AMD and other non-NVIDIA cards, no reverse engineering required.
• A Graphics card setting (Settings tab) picks which GPU runs the game when more than one is installed; NVIDIA-only features lock themselves off automatically once you pick a non-NVIDIA card.
• The HUD always stays as the game draws it.

🌿 A livelier Paldea

More wild Pokémon, in four levels. The setting takes effect after a restart.

Switch 2 uses the spawn values of the fan mod Pokémon Compass by Aria Seri and Kas Seri. The higher levels only raise the count. KarPur contains these numbers, none of the mod's files.

🕹️ Controls

• Mouse and keyboard or controller; the mouse turns the camera.

• A controls page in the style of the game's own menus, opened with F1 or Esc. It has:

  • remapping of every key and button
  • button layout and motion controls
  • vibration
  • stick dead zone and mouse sensitivity
  • the performance overlay (Off / FPS / Full)
  • Quit game, with a confirmation, so fullscreen no longer needs Alt-F4 (#25)

  Its texts are in English, German and Russian.

• The launcher itself works with a controller too (#30): the sidebar's tabs and Play follow the stick or D-pad, A opens a page or presses a button, B goes back.

🧰 The KarPur Launcher

• One file: no installation and no administrator rights.
• Home: a start page in your edition's colours, with Play, the state of your build, your last save and your current team (name and level, read when the game saves) at a glance.
• Setup: builds the game from your dumps, shaders included. A stopped build goes on where it stopped.
• Settings: everything from fullscreen and your graphics card to Frame Generation, before you start the game.
• Controls: keyboard, mouse and controller, with swapped sticks and an inverted camera.
• Saves: export your save as a .zip, import one, open its folder, or restore one of the last saves.
• Mods (experimental, only a few mods tried so far): add your own mods (a folder or a .zip, for example from NexusMods) and switch each on or off. Nothing of your game is replaced: KarPur gives the game a mod's file as it loads the original. Mods that only change files work; files a mod adds and a mod's code (exefs) are not supported yet, and the tab says so per mod.
• Repair and Update: only what changed is rebuilt. Your saves and settings stay.
• Feedback: a ready-made report about your system for a GitHub issue.

Getting started

1. Download KarPur-Launcher.exe from the releases page. Windows may warn that the file is unknown, because it is not signed: choose More info → Run anyway.
2. Choose your files in the Setup tab:
   • the base game (.xci)
   • the update and DLC (.nsp)
   • prod.keys
   • a target folder without spaces
3. Press Build. The first build takes about 30-60 minutes and keeps your PC busy:
   • the launcher downloads Python and the compiler from their official sources
   • it translates the game's code
   • it compiles karpur.exe
   • finally, it prepares all shaders
4. Play: press Play, or use the shortcut Pokémon Violet (KarPur) that the launcher puts into your target folder.

Your dumps, your keys and the built game stay on your PC. A guide in German is in docs/launcher.md. If you want to do everything by hand, see docs/setup-windows.en.md (Deutsch).

Troubleshooting

$env:TOTK_SUBMIT_DEFER = "0"
.\karpur.exe

Feedback

KarPur is mostly tested on the maintainer's PC, so reports from other systems help a lot. The launcher's Feedback tab fills in:

• your launcher version, game, update and DLC
• your GPU, CPU, RAM and Windows version

You add a few words, and with Attach log the end of the game's log. Open on GitHub opens it as a filled-in issue. You need a free GitHub account for that, and reports are public. Without an account, Copy report copies the report for anywhere else.

Known limits

• The game renders at 1920 × 1080; DLSS gives a sharper picture at higher window sizes. A higher native resolution is not done yet.
• Online features (Union Circle, trading, Tera Raid matchmaking) are not available.
• DLC is confirmed to work, including the story expansions.
• Draw distance settings for trees, grass, Pokémon and NPCs are not done yet.
• No temporal AMD upscaler (FSR 2) or frame generation yet; FSR 1 plus Handheld mode is the real performance option for now.

How it works

1. Lifting: the game's ARM64 executables are translated into C code automatically.
2. Runtime: our own code stands in for the Switch operating system, including threads, files, input and audio.
3. Graphics: the Switch graphics API (NVN) is mapped to Vulkan. The game's shaders are translated with the Ryujinx shader translator.
4. Build: Clang compiles everything into an .exe, on the player's own PC.
5. Run-time patches: the game's menus and data are extended as the game loads them. Your game files on disk stay untouched.

KarPur builds on the MIT-licensed TotK Recomp and LAS Recomp. Code taken from other projects is listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Built with AI

This project would not exist without AI. An AI coding agent (Claude Code by Anthropic) writes most of the code and documentation. It also plans the work, explains every step, and analyses the reports and crash logs.

The maintainer owns the game and the console, runs and tests every build on real hardware, and decides what goes in. The rules the agent works under are in CLAUDE.md.

Contributing

Read CLAUDE.md first for the project rules. Enable the protective hook once per clone:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Before every commit, run:

python tools/check_content.py --staged

License

The project's own code is under the MIT License; third-party code keeps its own license. The license grants nothing for the game.

KarPur is an independent, non-commercial fan project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, Game Freak or Creatures Inc. Pokémon, Pokémon Scarlet, Pokémon Violet and Nintendo Switch are trademarks of their respective owners.